Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/147

Rh off one by one as the world grows wiser. There is a curious handful of plain savage superstitions among the rules to which the Roman Flamen Dialis had to conform. He was not only prohibited from touching a dog, a she-goat, raw meat, beans, and ivy, but he might not even name them, he might not have a knot tied in his clothes, and the parings of his nails and the clippings of his hair were collected and buried under a lucky tree. So little difference does the mere course of time make in such things as these, that a modern missionary to a savage tribe may learn to understand them better than the Romans who practised them two thousand years ago.

It is quite true that there are anomalies among the superstitious practices of the lower races, proceedings of which the meaning is not clear, signs of the breaking-down or stiffening into formalism of beliefs carried down by tradition to a distance from their source; and besides, the rites of an old religion, carried down through a new one, may mix with such practices as have been described here, while the adherents of one religion are apt to ascribe to magic the beliefs and wonders of another, as the Christians held Odin, and the Romans Moses, to have been mighty enchanters of ancient times. But when we see the whole system of sorcery and divination comparatively compact and intelligible among savage tribes, less compact and less intelligible among the lower civilized races, and still less among ourselves, there seems reason to think that such imperfection and inconsistency as are to be found among this class of superstitions in the lower levels of our race, are signs of a degeneration (so to speak) from a system of error that was more perfect and harmonious in a yet lower condition of mankind, when man had a less clear view of the difference between what was in him and what was out of him, than the lowest savages we have ever studied, when his life was more like a long dream than even the life that the Puris are leading at this day, deep in the forests of South America.

There is a remarkable peculiarity by which the sorcery of the savage seems to repudiate the notion of its having come down from something higher, and to date itself from the childhood of